In a rough-hewn, concrete-floored warehouse, once a factory making worsted blankets for the military, a young man is pulling his trousers down. There's a handful of other people in the looming, 600-square-metre space, most so deep in conversation they have not noticed the discreet downward slide of fabric and the abrupt revelation of a pair of pale buttocks.

Now the shirt's off too, and a naked youth – vulnerably slight, a figure lingering somewhere between boy and man – is, with an air of complete self-containment, walking towards a bench, the kind you might see on a suburban train platform. He climbs on it, sits atop its back. Somehow a flame begins to pour from the bench's seat. He contemplates it silently. After a few moments, the fire disappears. The youth climbs down, moves on.

This is part of an exhibition of work by the artist Roger Hiorns, the man who, with the elan of an alchemist, filled an entire London council flat with glistening, ice-sharp copper sulphate crystals. (That work, Seizure, has recently been installed in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, just outside Wakefield.)

The naked youth is one of several in the Calder – a warehouse space that the Hepworth Wakefield, the two-year-old museum and gallery in West Yorkshire, has colonised. Other local authorities may be cutting back on culture, but Wakefield has paid to renovate the ground floor of a mid 19th century warehouse for the David-Chipperfield-designed gallery to use for at least three years.

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The rough-and-ready space will be used for performance art, music and artistic experiments. It is "a place we can allow things to unfold, a place where artists can be experimental", said the Hepworth Wakefield's director, Simon Wallis. The aim is for something less formal, more provisional, than the main gallery's pristine white rooms. If Tate Modern has its Tanks, the Hepworth Wakefield is to have its Calder.

Hiorns has filled it with his entire Youth series, a branch of his work spanning 15 years in which he has a young naked man approach and sit on some kind of found object. These range from a defunct jet engine to a coffee table embedded with plasma screens showing TV rolling news. There's a plastic bench lightly smeared with brain matter from a cow.

There is one of those indeterminate pieces of street furniture, somewhere between bench and security bollard, that has recently begun to spring up on Britain's city streets. Liking its appearance, "a dead weight in front of a building" with a touch of the sarcophagus, he persuaded Camden council to part with it.

The beginnings of these works – this "really awkward fleshy intervention between a machine or manmade object and a person" – came from a fascination with a photograph by Man Ray of his wife leaning against a printing press, "an act of merging" between the mechanical and the human. All the found objects have a kind of inherent power, either through their sheer bulk and heft, or, as in the case of the jet engine, a purposeful, potent former life. Hiorns has wrenched that power away and turned it to his own ends.

The naked young men were cast through an open call: 20 of them will appear in the exhibition over the next two months.

Robert Hardaker and Eamonn Harnett, both 23 and both artists, have no qualms about baring all: Hardaker regularly takes his kit off in his own performance works. Hardaker said he expects normal museum etiquette will dictate audience reaction – "You don't stand too close and you don't touch it."

When the Yorkshire autumn waxes cooler, industrial heaters will take the chill off, though, as Hiorns points out, there may be some competition among the performers to perch on the plasma screens, so comfortingly warming to the behind. "Nudity is perfectly straightforward," said Hardaker. "People say I'm being brave. It don't think it's brave. It's just normal."

Roger Hiorns is at the Calder, Hepworth Wakefield, from 30 August to 3 November.